Dirty: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.

  DIRTY copyright @ 2017 by Paula Cox. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DIRTY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  MINE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  SNEAK PEEK OF INKED!

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  DIRTY

  Chapter One

  Stella

  I try to focus on the book as the locker room jostles with life around me. Gina is especially bad. Maybe it’s because she’s tired of seeing me with my face buried between its pages, or just because she likes to hear me swear, but as I study the anatomy of the dog, she peers over the edge of the book, wriggling her eyebrows and honking to the tune of the announcer’s voice.

  “We’re almost on,” she says, and her eyebrows do a dancelike side-to-side.

  “Fine,” I say, closing the book. Every time I close the book and go to dance, I feel as though I’m becoming someone else. One moment I am the woman who has to be persuaded to turn away from studying; the next I am a cheerleader for the New York Nicks, smiling, empty-headed, vacuous, nodding. One moment I am a mind; the next I am a body. Or maybe I’m just getting overly philosophical about all this and I should take Gina’s viewpoint as my own: Just get on with it, she often says.

  “So soon your life will be hurt paws and aching doggy jaws.”

  I roll my eyes. “Hopefully, Gina, hopefully.”

  There’s about a minute to spare until we begin our bouncy procession out onto the basketball court, to be gawked at by thousands of people, many of them red-faced and hungry-looking men. The changing room is alive with activity as the girls put on finishing touches. Many of them stare into little pocket-mirrors, brushing their cheeks, testing their smiles. Gina hops from one foot to the other, contorting her face as she always does, making sure she can plaster it with her fake ear-to-ear grin. I lean back against the lockers, the metal cool and oddly comforting on my back, and think about dogs.

  It calms me.

  First, I think about dogs in general. Not even a particular breed, just dogs. I imagine I am standing at the turnstile of a giant field, a horizon-touching field, the grass stark and bright and lush, and then, as I walk farther into the field, hordes of dogs bound over the horizon toward me, tongues dangling between smiling teeth, tails wagging. They jump around me, bumping into each other for attention. I stroke as many as I can, giggling like a maniac. I know this would be some people’s idea of hell: being mauled by dogs. But I can’t stop smiling—in the dream. But soon my smile spreads from the daydream and into the locker room, and Gina taps me harshly on the shoulder.

  “Planet Earth to Stella,” she says.

  My head snaps up and I see Gina staring down at me, her lip curled in mock disapproval. Gina is tall, sleek, and red-haired like some kind of Viking princess: an inversion of me, in many ways. I am short and blonde and busty.

  “You were thinking about the field of dogs again,” Gina comments, with a small grin.

  “Maybe.”

  I made the mistake of telling Gina about the daydream whilst we were drunk about half a year ago. First she nodded along, listening. Then she began laughing, and then chortling. But she never told any of the other girls, and that’s how I knew Gina saw something in my daydream, the peace of it, maybe. It doesn’t matter that this is her aspiration, she is living it; she wants to be a cheerleader. It doesn’t matter that perhaps I make the other girls feel uncomfortable when I talk about veterinary college, but I think Gina sees the sense in my dream.

  What in the name of all that is holy am I doing? I ask myself, as the girls begin to file out of the locker room.

  I’m standing here, caught up in my thoughts. Gina tugs at my wrist and I grin sideways at her. “I was miles away,” I say.

  “Oh, I know,” Gina says. “You had that goddam puppy love look in your eye. Makes me sick.”

  People who don’t routinely work with crowds will see them as one big bulk of a thing, one beast, sprawling and many-armed. Like a giant mound of insects whose movement becomes something larger than any individual ant. But whenever I stand in front of a crowd, I see the individual people. As I walk onto the court today to the raucous cheers of thousands of Nicks’ fans, I see a man with his collar pulled up around a sausage-fat neck, face beetroot-red, clutching onto a huge pot of popcorn with two hands. I see a mother sitting with her daughter on her knee, both of them looking up at the man to their side, who leans forward and ogles us and even licks his lips. I see half a dozen frat boys, each of them with a letter drawn on their chest, red cups clasped in their hands. I scan their expression, and in each one there is something subtly different: here open lust; here resentment; here shame; here anger.

  But whilst we cheerleaders—or stand-up comedians or actors or ballerinas or motivational speakers—can spot things in the crowd, little snapshots of people, a crowd member would have a difficult time if he tried to spot something in us. All of us are smiling widely, all of us are grinning like madwomen.

  We bounce onto the court with our pom-poms waving and our butts wiggling, smiling radiantly at the crowd.

  I get into position without having to think about it. I’m twenty-five now and high school seems way further back than it should, but I was a cheerleader then and my body remembers. I’ve danced this routi
ne live four times now; it’s rote. My arms and legs pump to the beat without me having to think about it.

  As I dance, my gaze moves naturally over the crowed. I can’t look here or there whenever I like. I have to turn my head as the dance dictates. About halfway through, my gaze moves across the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.

  I’m not one for ogling, gawping, leering, creeping—or any other nasty verb which means openly declaring to a man with my eyes: I want you! I’m shy by nature. So I don’t ogle or gawp or leer or creep. I just glance at the man each time my eyes move to him in the course of the dance. I’d guess he’s around my age, perhaps a few years older. He’s blonde with close-cropped hair, and he wears an expensive-looking gray suit. His face is square, clean-shaven, strong. And his eyes, even from where I dance in the court, are blue. Not just blue, but summer-sky-blue, deep-ocean-blue.

  My body responds to this man almost instantly, my heart speeding up past what the dance demands, my palms sweating more than they usually do. Because this man is watching me. His piercing blue eyes are trained on me. And then they move. I follow their trail. They glance to his left, to the man two people over from him.

  It takes all my training as a dancer not to fumble. I have no idea how I manage to keep still. I’m reminded of when you’re walking a dog and a car backfires. No matter how well-trained the dog, it will invariably bolt—at least on instinct—before you call it back. But somehow I manage to keep going.

  The person who the gray-suited man watches is my ex-husband, Jeff. Jeff.

  Until just now, I didn’t know he was out of prison.

  Jeff.

  A hurricane of violence and stress and anger and hate. The kind of man to hurl a mug at the wall and watch as it shatters into dozens of pieces and then gesture at you with a broad-faced hammer. Pick it up! And what the hell are you supposed to do, exactly? What the hell is a nineteen-year-old girl in too deep meant to do against a brute of a man like that? More of a silverback gorilla, without any of the nobility. Just a big lumbering ogre, all bulging mounds of muscle, a dormant sack of power waiting to twitch into action. Two heads taller than me and three times as wide.

  He was charming at first, as they always are. I know that now because I’ve read up about it on the internet. That’s how narcissists and psychopaths get you. They play the proverbial Prince Charming, make all the right gestures and do all the rights things. They compliment you and they give you flowers and they always open doors for you and they make you believe—believe without question—they are this man they’re pretending to be.

  And so you move in, and get married. Then it starts. Odd little things, that was the way with us. I remember putting on a dress for one of my friend’s birthdays, a short pink dress I’d bought in the January sales a few weeks ago, a dress I’d been waiting for a chance to wear. Standing in front of the mirror, looking myself up and down, thinking: Pretty good, Stella, not bad. But then Jeff appeared at the door, filling the doorway with his unnecessary bulk, and sniffed the air as though something rotten. What the hell is that? Are you tryin’ to show the world your slit or what? Slit! He’d never used the word before.

  Take it off. Wear something that doesn’t make you look like a goddam hooker.

  He’d never been like this before. He’d always been kind. So if he’s getting angry, the logic of my warped brain told me, it must be my fault. Instead of nipping this in the bud, defying him and wearing the dress and showing him that I wouldn’t be bullied, I changed. I changed, and that was it. He had me.

  Two years of my life wasted on that man. I’d wanted to go to college earlier, but Jeff insisted that I worked as a waitress so he could have a wage packet from me every week. When I asked to put some aside to save, he laughed. Save, for what? When I told him, he laughed even louder, a mean laugh which didn’t reach his eyes. You’ve got a life, haven’t you? You’ve got a husband and you’ll have a kid soon. But I didn’t want a child, not with him, and I didn’t want the life I’d been tricked into.

  The first time he hit me, it was because I’d accidently dropped the television remote and the batteries had fallen out and one of them had rolled underneath the dresser. The gap between the bottom of the dresser and the floor was too small for even my hands, and when I stood up and told him it was no good, he backhanded me across the face. Casually. That was the worst of it. It wasn’t dramatic in the least. It was mundane. Just a casual backhand across the jaw.

  It took every ounce of willpower I had to leave him, gathering my things in the night and running into the dark corners of New York’s underbelly, staying at hostels and women’s refuges until I could get back on my feet. The only things that really made it alright—apart from the restraining orders—was when I heard he’d gone to prison for assault. A bar fight, apparently, and Jeff was locked up.

  I was staying at a women’s refuge at the time and when I returned to the room I shared with a Nigerian women called Asor and fell into my bed giggling like a hyena, wrenching giggles that sounded barely human. She asked me if something was wrong. I told her: No, everything is alright now.

  I thought it was. Assault and he’d gotten eight years for it. That was three years ago.

  And now he’s here, looking at me with that big dumb bulk of a face, his eyes deep set and shadowed beneath a Neanderthal’s jutting forehead. As I watch, he rubs his hands together.

  The handsome man moves toward Jeff, stands behind him, and then begins talking. It looks like they’re friends. When Jeff turns around, he laughs, a strange sound even in the arena, with thousands of people cheering and screaming. It cuts through the noise like a foghorn, alien-sounding. The two men laugh and talk together.

  The dance ends and it’s like I’m being carried off the court, even though my legs are carrying me. It’s instinct, part of the routine, and before I know it I’m back in the locker room and Gina is grinning at me, exhilarated as she always is after a dance. I’m rarely the same. Mostly, after a dance, I’m thinking about the wages and doing equations in my head. How many hours of college did I just buy? How much closer am I to becoming a vet? But today, as Gina babbles on and I get changed, all I can think about is Jeff.

  I think about asking one of the security guards to walk to my car with me, but I decide against it. I don’t want to have to explain why, open a crack to my past life and the woman I used to be. Gina and the other girls respect me. That’s how it seems, anyway. If I tell them that I was once beaten, defeated, that might change. Instead, I get out my college book and begin reading.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Gina asks, standing over me.

  “Just going to sit here for a little while,” I answer, as calmly and casually as I can.

  Gina nods, looking at me suspiciously, but she doesn’t press. The sight of me sitting there with a book in my hand, reading it when I don’t have to, isn’t suspicious enough to cause any problems.

  Soon she leaves me, the locker room empties, and I try to focus on the book.

  My plan is to wait until the game is over and the car park is full of fans. There’s no way Jeff will be able to find me in all that mayhem. And even if he did, what’s he going to do with all the security around?

  ***

  The car park is crowded with police. Not security, but actual police. Their blue lights bounce off the asphalt. It’s dark, autumn, and the car park is glazed with a fine sheen of rain. The moonlight and the police lights combine to make the floor seem bright, too bright for my eyes. I walk through the crowd, squinting. I try to ignore the police cars and the people, but soon I realize I’m walking through the crowd, toward the lights. A coincidence, I tell myself. The lights just happen to be in the same direction as my car. Anyway, I’m constantly scanning the crowd, waiting for Jeff to spring out on me. A can of hairspray bulges from my pocket. If he appears, I’ll blind him and run.

  Finally, I thread my way through the crowd and reach my car. I stop abruptly at the police barrier. An officer waves his hand in front of my face and te
lls me to back away. People nudge me from all sides, peering over my shoulders at the car: the car which the police surround. My car. My car.

  My mind conjures up stories which make no sense. I imagine Gina planting drugs in my glove box. She would never do that, doesn’t do drugs as far as I know, but I imagine her all the same dropping the drugs into my car with a sly smile. Or perhaps someone has attached a bomb to my car. Or something . . . what? What?

  “What . . . what . . .”

  I realize I’m shouting above the crowd. The officer who waved me back—a beanpole man with a thick brown mustache above thin lips—approaches me.

  “Ma’am, step back, please.”

  “What happened?” I shout.

  “Nothing to worry about, ma’am—”

  “That’s my car!” I roar.

  My heart gallops in my chest, hooves thudding against my ribcage.

  “Oh,” the police officer says. “Wait here.”

  The news reverberates through the crowd, but I barely hear it:

  “It’s her car!”

  “Who is she?”

  “A cheerleader! The short blonde cheerleader!”

  “Her car? What the hell?”

  A man wearing a long black coat returns with the beanpole officer. His face is haggard and his eyes are pits and he looks world-weary. He’s a detective, I guess.